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Although it couldn’t be seen from the top of the hillock, there was a body hidden among the grass. Or rather, what was left of one. The skeleton had been picked clean, the white bones still covered with straps of tattered clothing. With a sense of growing unease, Stirling studied the cloth until spotting numerous tiny holes in the material. Glancing at the boots, he saw the same thing. Holes neatly punched through the leather, including the wooden soles. Aw, hell.
“Drinker!” Stirling shouted in warning, pulling his handblaster and firing randomly at the ground. There was no point in being quiet now. If this was a drinker territory, the underground mutie already knew they were there.
Rallying at the cry, the other sec men started peppering the soil with blasterfire, while Nathan pulled out a pipe bomb and a cherished butane lighter. Holding them tight, he nervously looked around, watching the soil for any suspicious movements.
“Get on the horses!” Stirling ordered, backing away from the skeleton. “We ride north until reaching solid rock, and then—”
That was as far as he got when a section of grassland exploded into a wiggling pile of pale green tentacles that shot into the air and lashed about, searching for food. Human food.
“Nuke me!” Gill spit, firing both barrels of the scattergun.
The double charge blew off one of the thrashing limbs. But as the tentacle hit the ground it continued to flop wildly, and there was no sign of blood on the ragged end, only a thin greenish fluid resembling watery sap.
Flicking a butane lighter alive, Renée lit an oily rag fuse and threw a Molotov at the underground creature. The bottle hit with a crash, and flames erupted at that spot. As the fire grew, the plant quickly withdrew, but reappeared a few yards farther away.
“Frag me, there’s two of them!” Stirling cursed, spotting another set of waving tentacles.
Dodging around the thick grass, he tried to stay in the open field. The lush areas of growth were caused by the rotting corpses of the drinker’s victims. The greenery marked the lair of the mutie plant, even as it served to hide the old bones from casual sight. A mixed blessing then, and the sec chief cursed himself as the son of a feeb for not spotting it sooner. That’s why there were no tracks in the field. No animal or mutie would come this way. Even war wags avoid drinkers!
By now, the rest of the sec men were firing blasters at the ground or tossing bombs. The night shook with the explosions, and the two drinkers attacked the empty air around each strike, but not the blast hole itself. It was almost as if the drinkers understood that the bombs were being thrown.
Were the plants getting smarter, too? Stirling raged as he zigzagged across the ground. First the stickies of Two Son ville, and now this drek!
Holding on to the sec chief’s horse, Gill was waving around the scattergun, with two spare shells sticking out of his mouth for faster loading. The others were spreading out, trying to confuse the mutie, firing blasters at anything that moved. The light from the Molotovs helped them to see the deadly tentacles tunneling below the surface, and Renée cried out once as a failing limb whipped across her face, leaving a score of deep scratches from the thorny tip.
That was too damn close, Stirling realized, trying to catch his breath while perched on top of a rock. Then he scowled darkly at Porter. The coward was just sitting on his horse and doing nothing. Not a fragging thing to help. To hell with the baron’s orders, he was going to personally ace the yellow bastard as soon as they got out of this field alive.
But then the sec chief saw the problem. The horse had too many legs, there were six, not just four. Not legs, tentacles going straight up from the ground and into the belly of the beast! Sitting astride the animal, Taw Porter was sitting absolutely still and was even more pale than usual. Then Stirling saw the man’s clothing start to move as hundreds of tiny vines crawled out of the sec man’s body. One came out of his mouth to test the air, only to retreat again.
Shooting from the hip, Stirling blew off the back of the sec man’s head just to make sure the man was actually deceased. Pink and greenish fluids exploded out of smashed skull, then his hair came alive as tiny vines writhed from the ghastly wound and exited from his mouth, nose and ears. Only the dead eyes stayed intact to stare calmly into the starry heavens.
Suddenly, Renée’s horse screamed as a tentacle attacked, the curved thorns sinking deep into its legs. Then the vine began to pulsate as it started pumping out the rich red blood.
Waving her Browning longblaster, Renée could only curse and try to stay in the saddle. The angle made it impossible for her to get a shot at the subterranean monster.
“Cross fire!” Stirling shouted from the rock.
Working the bolt on his M-16, Nathan chambered a round and fired. The tentacle jerked from the arrival of the 5.56 mm hardball round, blood and sap gushing from the hole. Instantly, the tentacle released the horse’s leg and slid underground.
But as Nathan worked the bolt to chamber a fresh round, the used brass popped out and hit the soil. A split second later several tentacles exploded upward from that point, lashing madly with their deadly thorn-tipped vines.
Gill put both barrels of the scattergun into the monstrous thing, the wide spray of pellets doing the job proper, but also catching Nathan’s horse in the rump. The startled animal reared onto its hind legs, and Nathan had to drop the M-16 to grab the reins and stay in the saddle.
Deciding this was his best chance, Stirling bolted from the rock and raced across the flat ground, expecting to be aced at every step. The sec chief tightened his grip on the blaster as he crossed one yard, two, three…As his horse came into range, Stirling bodily threw himself across the saddle.
“Yee-ha!” Gill cried, kicking his own mount into motion, and dragging Stirling’s horse along by the reins.
Struggling clumsily, the sec chief grabbed the pommel with both hands and hauled himself upright to sit astride the saddle and take back the reins.
“Mother nuker!” he yelled in triumph. “Gotta move faster than that, you mutie bastard, to ace a Two-Son man!”
But a split second later, the ground around their former location started to move with vines and tentacles. As the questing limbs found nothing, a deep inhuman moan sounded from below the grass, the horrible noise echoing across the lush tundra and seeming to rattle the leaves on every bush.
“If you’re mad at us now, try this!” Renée snarled, flipping a pipe bomb at the thing.
“Scatter!” Stirling ordered, kicking his horse into a full gallop. The animal responded with adrenaline-fueled speed.
The sec men did as ordered and broke ranks to take off in different directions. A few heartbeats later, the bomb thunderously detonated, blowing a geyser of flame and vines into the air.
But then from the charred pit arose a…something. Only half seen in the cloudy night, it was huge with a lumpy skin that was constantly twitching. Looking around, the misshapen creation gave a low moan.
“Black dust, Buddha and drek, we got a drinker out of its burrow!” Gill cursed, looking over a shoulder. “We’re in for it now, amigos!”
“Shut up and move!” Stirling ordered, pulling a blaster from his holster. The sec chief fired two fast shots, and the others obeyed the signal to converge upon Stirling while still moving at a gallop.
Dimly lit by the dying flames of the Molotovs, the drinker was starting to crawl after the fleeing sec force. As it advanced, more and more of the animal-like plant came out of the smoking hole in the ground, oddly resembling a worm pulled out of its moist burrow. As it exited, the other drinker retreated. Then the end came out of the ground, looking exactly like the front.
“Son of a bitch, there isn’t two of them, just one biggun!” Nathan stormed, a fresh bomb tight in his hand. “How large do these fragging bastards get?”
“I say we keep running and don’t find out!” Alton added gruffly, frantically reloading the Remington.
Hunched low in the saddle, Stirling wanted to agree, but he could see white foam on the mouth of Renée’s animal. The wounded horse was doing its best, but would soon collapse and leave the woman behind to feed the giant mutie.
“Bomb count!” the sec chief shouted, moving to the rhythm of the horse as he reached into the rear saddlebags.
“Ten!”
“Six!
“Nine!”
“Four!”
“Use one each—no, two!” Stirling barked, casting a quick glance behind. The drinker was completely out of its hole, and still coming. It was as if the inside of a dark tunnel had come to life. Triple-damn thing was larger than the Metro, he thought. “Okay, we’ll take this thing the way we did that pack of wolves at Dead Man’s Gulch! Now, follow me!”
The others spread out behind the chief like a flock of birds racing from an aerial predator.
Retracing their route, Stirling slowed his mount as they reached a shallow ravine. Easing his horse over the edge and down the clay bank, Stirling sprinted across the small stream to hastily scramble up the other side again.
Reaching the top, the sec chief forced his panting animal to halt, and pulled out a pipe bomb and a knife. Cutting the fuse to a short length, Stirling impatiently waited for the others to join him just as the drinker arrived. Black dust, it was big! As the other sec men galloped across the ravine, the drinker was close behind, and almost stretched itself over the gully like some monstrous bridge, then down it went, the tentacles and vines lashing and whipping madly about in every direction.
“Light it up!” Stirling bellowed, dropping the knife to grab his butane lighter to start the fuse.
The moment it caught, he flipped the bomb over the edge into the ravine. The lead pipe hit the water with a splash, closely followed by four more bombs. Slowly rising upward, the drinker lifted its inhuman face above the rim and looked directly at the tiny norms with a face crawling with vines and roots. The eyes were strangely human, full of rage and hatred.
With their hearts pounding, the sec men threw another salvo of bombs and Molotovs just as the first charges detonated. The whole landscape seemed to shake from the force of the multiple explosions in the ravine. As writhing flames rose along its side, the drinker raised both eyes to the stars and keened in pain, the cry lost in the triphammer blasts of the other pipe bombs. A volcano of muddy water and tentacles flew into the air, shrapnel zinging everywhere, and the drinker bulged oddly, then seemed to come apart from the inside, gushing viscous fluids from every orifice.
Knowing what to expect, the sec men raced for cover as the grisly debris rained down, pulsating organs impacting the ground with wet smacks strangely reminiscent of a passionate kiss. As the reverberations died away, the drinker gave an eerily humanlike sigh and collapsed onto the clay bank of the shallow ravine, its split head only inches from the grass.
Sliding off his horse, Stirling passed the reins to Renée. Drawing his revolver, the sec chief warily proceeded to the crumbling edge of the smoke-filled ravine. There was only churning water below, mixed with bloody debris. A thorny tentacle lay twitching on a small boulder, and a single great eye rested in the shallow creek, staring up at eternity in soulful reproach.
“Everybody okay?” Stirling demanded, warily watching flesh and organs in the ravine for any unnatural motion. Only a feeb trusted a mutie, even a chilled one.
“No, Gill got hit!” Alton answered loudly.
Turning from the ravine, Stirling saw Gill holding a knife in his hand and poking at the piece of tentacle across his left arm.
“Can’t cut it off,” the sec man grunted as a trickle of blood appeared from the end of the plat. “Fragging thorns are in deep!”
“Put that blade away,” Stirling said, sliding the strap of his longblaster over a shoulder. “We gotta burn it off.”
“I…was hoping if I moved fast enough…” Gill panted, stabbing the knife under the throbbing length of plant once more. Then he sighed and dropped his shoulders. “But that was a stupe’s wish, eh, Chief?”
“Would have tried the same thing myself, Gill,” Stirling said soothingly. “Burning is no fun. Nathan!”
“Sir?” the teenager replied spinning about with a pipe bomb at the ready.
“You and Porter—” The chief stopped and started again. “You and Alton check the horses for damage. Renée, watch their backs. I’ll do Gill.”
“Shouldn’t we move away from here first?” Nathan asked, casting a glance at the body parts strewed about. “All this blood and meat is going to attract every pred for klicks.”
“Preds, rists and muties, ya mean,” Renée corrected grimly, reloading the BAR with sure fingers.
“No time,” Stirling growled, helping Gill off his horse and onto a nearby mound of dirt. “We do this fast, or Gill joins the sky choir.”
Sitting, the sweaty man watched as Stirling wrapped a cloth around the upper part of the wounded arm, then tied the rag into a tight tourniquet. The trickle of blood from the gaping end of the vine slowed, but not by much.
“Better find something to bite on,” Stirling warned as he pulled a bag of black powder from a pouch on his gunbelt.
“I got some shine in my bags,” Alton offered from among the horses. “That’ll help kill the pain.”
“And make me useless for the rest of the night,” Gill replied, pulling off his gunbelt. “Just do it, and be fast.”
Pouring the black powder along the spiky piece of vine, the sec chief said nothing, concentrating on the work. When the ammo bag was empty, Stirling passed it to Gill, who stuffed the leather into his mouth. Thumbing a butane lighter alive, the sec chief glanced at his friend. Gill gave a nod, and Stirling lit the powder.
There was a blinding flare and Gill gave a muffled scream, every muscle going rigid. He became lost in the searing glare, but as the harsh light died away, Stirling saw that the smoldering vine lay twitching on the ground. A neat line of holes went across the sec man’s arm, but the bleeding had already slowed to a trickle, then stopped completely.
“Bet you could use that drink now.” Stirling snorted, angrily stomping his boot to grind the charred vine into the ground. The smoking length crumbled apart with a crunchy noise, and finally ceased to move.
“Gill?” Stirling asked, raising his head.
But the sec man lay slumped over on the mound of earth.
Worried, Stirling checked the man’s pulse, but found it strong and steady. The sec man had just fallen unconscious from the pain. Gently rubbing the old wound on his shoulder, Stirling really couldn’t fault the man. He’d done the same thing himself once.
“Should we let him sleep?” Nathan asked, stepping closer to offer one of the new med kits. “We could build a fire, and there are plenty of blankets.” The kit was just a lumpy canvas bag with the letters M*A*S*H carefully stitched into the fabric. Mildred had showed the ville healers a lot of tricks for keeping people alive, shine to wash wounds, boiled white cloth for bandages, and such. These crude duplicates of her predark med kit were the result. With one of these, a sec man had a hundred times better chance of surviving a wound than ever before. Just another of the countless debts for which they could never completely repay the outlanders.
“Hell, no. We get moving,” Stirling declared, opening the canvas bag. “The smell of blood is in the wind, and soon this place is going to be overrun with animals and muties fighting over the scraps of the drinker.”
From high above there came a screamwing cry, and in the distance a stickie hooted.
“Mebbe even a second drinker,” Alton stated, checking the load in the scattergun. He closed the breech with a snap and set the lock. “We got enough bombs to stop another one, but not while we’re also fighting screamwings!”
A blaster shot sounded, then another, and Renée appeared, reloading her revolver.
“Okay, vines fell on two of the horses and I had to ace them,” the sec woman stated without emotion. “So we’ll have to double up, or drop supplies.”
“We drop nothing,” Stirling barked, pouring shine over the sec man’s arm. The raw alcohol washed the open wounds and became tinted with red. Gill gave no response. Satisfied, the sec chief put away the bottle of shine and started to wrap the forearm.
The cloth strips had been immersed in boiling water for as long as a man could hold his breath. Something about killing stuff called gems, or germs. Whatever. Mildred had taught them this. Tying off the bandage, Stirling packed the med supplies into the canvas bag. Everybody Mildred treated got better ten times faster than seemed possible, so mebbe she was right about germs. Chilling was his job, not putting folks back together afterward.
“Okay, we’re short on rides,” Stirling said, slinging the canvas bag over the pommel of his horse. The animal whinnied nervously at its master, and he tenderly scratched it behind the ears. “Divvy up the food, keep all of the ammo, and we’ll travel in pairs. Renée rides with me, Nathan with Gill, Alton gets all of the extra bombs and water.”
The hooting sounded again, closer this time, and down in the ravine something started savaging the tattered chunks of the dead mutie.
Without comment, the Two-Son ville sec men rushed to their assigned tasks and were soon galloping away from the ravine. Taking the lead, Stirling realized that he had lost all sense of direction fleeing from the drinker. Arbitrarily, he chose the largest object in sight to guide them through the night, and headed the group straight for the jagged peaks of the Mohawk Mountains.
There was a thick copse a few klicks away that they could bed down in for the night. The sec men should be safe enough there. Hopefully.
Chapter Five
The roiling clouds filled the sky as the companions raced across the New Mex desert. A dull glow emanated from above, but whether it was the full moon or airborne rads rich with hot isotopes was impossible to say. Then the moon broke through for a scant moment, bathing the world in cool silvery light before vanishing behind the curtain of polluted clouds once more.
Hours passed as the miles flew beneath the pounding hooves of their horses. Soon, the ground turned into a mix of sand and soil, then came irregularly spaced tufts of weeds and grass. Finally the companions galloped across a flat grassland. There was no reeking taint of acid rain on the wind, only the sweet smell of living plants, so the companions gave the animals their heads, and let them run free, stretching their muscles as the group moved swiftly across one of the small sections of the Zone that was still alive.
“Lovely,” Doc said, inhaling the clean breeze. “Just lovely.”
Scowling darkly, Ryan grunted at the pronouncement.
“Yeah, fragging swell,” J.B. added sarcastically, pulling an anti-pers gren from his munitions bag and checking the tape on the arming handle. “As long as we don’t run into any drinkers. Grass and sand are a bad mix.”
“Especially on the fairway near the sixth hole,” Mildred said in wry amusement to herself.
Her red hair streaming in the wind, Krysty shot the physician a strange look. Mildred could only shrug, unable to explain the golfing allusion. Then she gave a start. Just a minute, there was a water hole here, and copse of trees standing in the middle of nowhere, long stretches of flat grassland…They were riding across a golf course! Okay, one overrun with weeds and bushes, now mixing with the real desert, and slightly nuked a hundred years ago, but still easily identifiable as a golf course.
“You spotted the design, too, eh, madam?” Doc asked.
“Kind of hard to miss when you know what to look for,” Mildred answered, hunkering lower in her saddle. Surrounded by a slice of the past, the fairway only incurred uncomfortable memories for the woman, and she concentrated on riding. The game of golf was as far in the past to her now as a New Year’s Eve party. Long gone, and only dimly remembered.
Ryan’s rad counter suddenly started to click wildly, and he abruptly veered to the left, starting a long curving sweep across the flat landscape. The others had seen this sort of thing many times before, and stayed close. The one-eyed man couldn’t see any indications of a blast crater, there were no glowing pits or glass lakes. But he knew that could simply mean the area had been hit with one of those air-burst atomic bombs he’d read about. Mebbe one of those neutron things that killed folks, but didn’t harm the buildings or plants.
“Golf?” Jak asked, arching a snowy eyebrow. “Not see sign of ocean.”
“No, not a gulf, golf. It’s a game, you see, and…” Mildred started, then bit her tongue. “Never mind. Just old talk.”
Bent low over his mare, the teen accepted the answer with a shrug. He knew the physician had been born long before skydark and sometimes talked about things almost impossible to translate clearly. He never would have understood the notion of an elevator until taking a ride in one in the redoubts.
Keeping careful track of the rise and fall of the clicks of the rad counter, Ryan and J.B. directed the companions past the lingering death of the invisible rad zone. Once the clicks returned to the normal level of background rad, Ryan called a halt on the crest of a low sweeping hillock. The elevation gave them a commanding view of the landscape. Even in the dappled light from the moving clouds, they could see there was nobody around for miles in every direction.
